Ramadan and Al-Fatiha Give Gay Muslims Two Reasons to Celebrate October
The word Al-Fatiha comes from the first chapter of the Koran and means “The Opening” or “The Beginning” in Arabic. Al-Fatiha, the organization for gay Muslims, evolved from an e-mail message sent by a 19-year-old college student, Faisal Alam, to a listserv linking several Muslim students groups; the message asked “Is anyone out there a gay Muslim?”
Most of the responses were negative but he received enough positive ones to begin a new listserv dealing with issues on gay Muslims. In October of the following year he organized a three-day retreat attended by 40 of his subscribers, including four international participants who came from South Africa, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Al-Fatiha grew rapidly under Alam’s leadership, becoming a U.S.-based non-profit organization with official chapters in eight cities throughout the U.S.: Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Diego and Washington D.C., as well as sister organizations in Canada, England and South Africa.
A search through yahoo’s online communities, however, yielded 39 individual listserv discussion groups associated with Al-Fatiha, most of them organized by region, which probably means that there are a few other “unofficial” chapters.
“For me this is a personal journey,” said Al-Fatiha co-chair Asif Hassan, 30. “I had internalized many of the homophobic views expressed by most Muslims and I thought that because I was gay, because I knew I was gay, it meant that I couldn’t live as a Muslim.
“I heard about Al-Fatiha (four years ago) and it opened the door to the possibility of reclaiming my right to define my own relationship with my religion and my God,” he added. “Our membership tends to be younger because of generational differences in ideology but our mission is to include all regardless of age or sexual orientation.”
Hassan shares Al-Fatiha’s leadership with Khalida Saed. They were both elected co-chairs after founder Alam announced last summer that he was retiring as director and chairman of the organization. Hassan said Alam is taking a Sabbatical and is expected to come back as a board member.
Al-Fatiha’s upcoming projects in the U.S. include a retreat for Muslim lesbian and bisexual women.
“We would like to see a reform movement within Islam in which the more rigid and outdated interpretations give way to the ideals of peace, equality and justice that are at the core of our religion,” Hassan said. “I believe the progressive vision of Islam is feminist and inclusive.”
Before moving to Texas to pursue a Ph.D. in Physics from Rice University, Hassan lived in Los Angeles, where he helped organize the first International Gay Muslim Film Festival, sponsored by Al-Fatiha.
The three-day festival showcased one documentary about Muslim women’s sexuality and about a dozen films, most of them shorts, dealing with LGBT issues.
“We got a lot of really positive feedback from the community,” Hassan said. “We sold about 70 tickets per night.”
This country is home to an estimated six million Muslims, the fastest-growing religious group in the U.S. before 9/11.
California tops the nation as the state with the most mosques, the places of prayer that are the Muslim equivalent of Christian churches. In 2001 California had 227 mosques, according to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs.
Another large Muslim community, of about 10,000, is located in Las Vegas.
“Not too many people I know have come out in their congregations,” Hassan said. “Most of the main Muslim organizations, the leadership, are not very welcoming.”
That’s a nice way of describing it, considering the harsh remarks published last year by Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi, former president of the Islamic Society of North America, the country’s leading Muslim organization.
Siddiqi described homosexuality as a “moral disease, a sin and corruption” and said that “no person is born homosexual, just like no one is born a thief, a liar or murderer. People acquire these evil habits due to a lack of proper guidance and education.”
About 26 Muslim countries explicitly condemn homosexuality in their criminal codes, according to Amnesty International. Punishments for violating anti-gay laws in most of those countries range from fines and jail time to public flogging. Seven of those countries go a step further, naming homosexual acts as crimes punishable by death.
“Even in the United States there is such a negative stigma, for the individuals and for the family, from the rest of the Muslim community that some people might never be able to come out,” Hassan said.
But there is hope in the horizon.
A group of predominantly young Muslims in New York launched last year a new organization called “The Progressive Muslim Union of North America.”
Organizers said the group was formed to speak up in favor of creating a broader role for women in mosques, supporting gay rights and creating alternative Islamic spaces for Muslims with similar values.
“There is a strong cultural element mixed within the religion and many people don’t draw a line between the two,” Al-Fatiha’s Hassan said. “It’s an important goal of the progressive movement to identify and differentiate between the true spirit of the religion and some of the practices and interpretations that come from cultural or even regional customs.”
For updated information about The Progressive Muslim Union of North America, visit the site www.muslimwakeup.com and for more information about Al-Fatiha, or to join their mailserv, e-mail gaymuslims@yahoo.com.
